The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2 page)

The august James Bowdoin was included in this circle of inquisition as well. Bowdoin was one of the principal American exemplars of the Enlightenment. A close friend of Franklin's, he was a student of electricity and
astronomy, as well as a poet, publishing a volume titled
A Paraphrase on Part of the Oeconomy of Human Life
in 1759, and four poems in the volume
Harvard Verses
presented to George III in 1762 “in an attempt to gain royal patronage for the struggling college,” as Gordon E. Kershaw notes. His remarkable library contained 1,200 volumes, ranging in subjects from science and math to philosophy, religion, poetry and fiction. By the time of this interview, he had become a vocal opponent of Governor Hutchinson's policies. Bowdoin would become the governor of Massachusetts in 1776. In addition to opposing the policies of the royalists in the room, Bowdoin was also a steadfast foe of “his old political enemy,” John Hancock, who was also in the room.

Like Bowdoin, Hancock prepared for Harvard at Boston Latin, then graduated from Harvard in the class of 1754, the second youngest in a class of twenty, in which he ranked fifth, William Fowler notes, as “an indication of his family's prominence.” (His
uncle, Thomas—his guardian after age eight—was one of Boston's wealthiest merchants, and John was raised in a Beacon Hill mansion.) Upon his uncle's death in 1764, John assumed the leadership of the House of Hancock, which grew rich by trafficking in whale oil and real estate. In part because the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 had such dire effects on business, and because he resented what he saw as an abridgement of his rights as an Englishman, Hancock increasingly identified his interests with the patriots, both as a Boston selectman and member of the General Court. Hancock became something of a hero in patriot circles when, in 1768, his sloop, the
Liberty
, was seized for smuggling Madeira. The Sons of Liberty organized a mob, which attacked the customs officials, who then fled for their lives. Hancock was hailed as a victor over British oppression, and would go on to become the third president of the Continental Congress, and the first governor of the Commonwealth.

The Reverend Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather, graduated from Harvard College in 1723. He was Thomas Hutchinson's brother-in-law. Mather's career as a minister was quite controversial—he was charged with “improper conduct” in 1741, and, though found innocent, was dismissed that same year from his pulpit at the Second Church in Boston. (Misbehavior among Boston clerics was regarded less leniently than would later be the case!) Mather is principally remembered for his library, which Mason I. Lowance describes as “one of the greatest in New England.” But he is also remembered, Lowance concludes, as being “the end of that dynasty” that had commenced with his great-grandfather Richard in 1630.

What an astounding collection of people were gathered in the room that morning—relations and rivals, friends and foes. Here truly was a plenum of talent and privilege, cultivation and power. There were seven ordained ministers, three poets, six staunch loyalists,
and several signal figures in the battle for independence. Of these eighteen gentlemen, many were Harvard graduates.

What they were not, however, was an association for the advancement of colored people. Of the eighteen gentlemen assembled, a majority were slaveholders: one, Thomas Hubbard, had actually been a dealer in slaves. Even the venerable James Bowdoin bought and sold slaves in the 1760s, while we know from Joseph Green's will that he left one hundred pounds to his slave “Plato.” Another, the Reverend Charles Chauncy, in 1743, had attacked the Great Awakening because it allowed “women and girls; yea Negroes—to do the business of preachers.”

Five among them—Bowdoin, Cooper, Hubbard, Moorhead, and Oliver—would be immortalized by the poet herself either in elegies upon their deaths or occasional verse. In the hands of this group, self-constituted as judge and jury, rested the fate of Phillis Wheatley, and to a large extent the destiny of the African-American
literary tradition, on that October day in 1772.

Why had this august tribunal been assembled by John Wheatley, Phillis's master? They had one simple charge: to determine whether Phillis Wheatley was truly the author of the poems she claimed to have written. John Wheatley hoped that they would support Phillis's claim of authorship, and that the opinion of the general public would follow.

And to understand how fraught this moment was, we need to turn from the judges to the one they were judging.

 

The girl who came to be known as Phillis Wheatley came to town on July 11, 1761, on board a schooner, the
Phillis
, owned by Timothy Finch and captained by Peter Gwinn. The ship had recently returned from gathering slaves in Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea. Among its cargo was “a slender frail, female child,” a Wheatley relative would write, “supposed to
have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth.” It's a fair guess that she would have been a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambian coast. Mrs. Susanna Wheatley, wife of the prosperous tailor and merchant, John Wheatley, in response to advertisements in the
Boston Evening Post
and the
Boston Gazette and Country Journal
in July and August, went to the schooner to purchase a house servant. Mrs. Wheatley acquired the child at the wharf on Beach Street “for a trifle,” one of her descendants tells us, “as the captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without emolument, by death.” The child was “naked,” covered only by “a quantity of dirty carpet about her like a fillibeg.”

The two boarded “the chaise of her mistress” and returned to the Wheatley mansion located on the corner of King Street and Mackerel Lane (today's State and Kilby Streets), just a few blocks from the Old State House. Both the Stamp Act riots of 1765 and
the Boston Massacre of 1770 took place down the street from her front door. Wheatley's loving biographer, William Robinson, estimates her purchase price as less than ten pounds. Susanna Wheatley named the child “Phillis,” ironically enough, after the name of the schooner that had brought her from Africa.

According to Robinson, Phillis's Boston consisted of 15,520 people in 1765, 1,000 of whom were black. Of this black population only eighteen, as of 1762, were free. Between Phillis's arrival in 1761 and her death in 1784, “no black children,” Robinson continues, “could be counted among the more than 800 young scholars enrolled in the city's two grammar or Latin schools and the three vocational writing schools.”

John and Susanna Wheatley had teenaged twins, Nathaniel and Mary, who were living at home when Phillis arrived. For reasons never explained, Mary, apparently with her mother's enthusiastic encouragement, began
to teach the child slave to read. (Mary would marry the Reverend John Lathrop, known as “the Revolutionary Preacher,” and pastor of the Old North Church.) Phillis, by all accounts, was a keen and quick pupil. As Lathrop wrote to a friend in 1773, his wife had “taught her to read, and by seeing others use the pen, she learned to write.” Mary tutored Phillis in English, Latin, and the Bible. William Robinson aptly calls her “rewardingly precocious.” That, if anything, is an understatement. As John Wheatley wrote in 1772 of her intellect and progress in letters:

Recall that this seven-year-old slave spoke no English upon her arrival in 1761. By 1765, she had written her first poem; in 1767, when she was thirteen or fourteen, the
Newport Mercury
published a poem that Susanna Wheatley submitted on her behalf. In 1770, when she was about seventeen, she immortalized the Boston Massacre in her poem, “On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March, 1770.” It reads in part:

That same year, her elegy on the death of the Reverend George Whitefield—the widely popular English preacher, leader of the evangelical movement, and favorite of Susanna Wheatley—was published within weeks of his sudden and untimely death during a speaking tour in America. This exceptionally popular poem was published as a broadside in Boston, then again in Newport, four more times in Boston, and a dozen more in New York, Philadelphia, and Newport. Advertisements for the broadside appeared in “more than a dozen newspapers in Pennsylvania, New York, and Boston, and at least ten times in Boston newspapers alone.” Whitefield had been
the chaplain of an English philanthropist, Selina Hastings, the countess of Huntingdon. Wheatley shrewdly apostrophized the countess in the Whitefield elegy, and sent a letter of condolence with the poem enclosed. With the poem's subsequent publication in London in 1771, Wheatley suddenly had a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. It made her the Toni Morrison of her time.

Delighted with her slave's dazzling abilities and her growing fame, Susanna Wheatley set out to have Phillis's work collected and published as a book. Advertised in the Tory paper, the Boston
Censor
, on February 29, March 14, and April 18, 1772, was a list of the titles of twenty-eight poems that would make up Wheatley's first book, if enough subscribers—perhaps 300—could be found to underwrite the cost of publication. But the necessary number of subscribers could not be found because not enough Bostonians could believe that an African slave possessed the requisite degree of reason and wit to write a poem by herself.

To understand why Wheatley's achievement prompted such incredulity, it helps to know something about the broader discourse of race and reason in the eighteenth century. To summarize a vast and complex body of literature, involving Francis Bacon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Frederick Hegel, many philosophers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were vexed by the question of what kind of creatures Africans truly were—that is, were they human beings, descended along with Europeans from a common ancestor and fundamentally related to other human beings, or were they, as Hume put it in 1753, another “species of men,” related more to apes than to Europeans? As Hume wrote:

Just ten years later, Kant, responding directly to Hume, expanded upon his observations:

The question of whether Africans were human was less related to color than the possession of reason, a tradition inaugurated by Descartes. But how was the faculty of reason
to be recognized? Increasingly after Hume voiced his doubts about the African's capacity to create “arts and sciences,” the question turned on whether or not Africans could write, that is, could create imaginative literature. If they could, this line of reasoning went, then they stood as members of the human family on the Great Chain of Being. If they could not, then the Africans were a species sub-human, more related to the apes than to Europeans. Even Thomas Jefferson had associated Africans with apes: black males find white women more beautiful than black women, Jefferson had argued, “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black woman over his own species.” As the Reverend Robert Nickol would put it in 1788, “I have not heard that an ourang outang has composed an ode.”

All of this helps us to understand why Wheatley's oral examination was so important. If she had indeed written her poems, then this would demonstrate that Africans
were human beings and should be liberated from slavery. If, on the other hand, she had not written, or could not write her poems, or if indeed she was like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly, then that would be another matter entirely. Essentially, she was auditioning for the humanity of the entire African people.